A most enjoyable day was had by all, despite the heavy rain when a group of 38 Barnet members, lead by Paul Lang and assisted by Susie Shaw, took a day trip to Bletchley Park, near Milton Keynes, in honour of Morris Hoffman z"l, who worked there during WWII. With audio-visual guides in hand we learned of the establishment of Bletchley as a centre for code breaking during WWII, as we toured the different buildings and huts in the grounds of this mansion house. Of particular interest was Hut 3 where Morris worked during the war, translating and making sense of codes that had been deciphered in the next door hut. Hut 6. It was a huge job as the German Enigma machine had 159 million, million, million different possible permutations! After a picnic lunch we split into two groups and were taken on a tours of the estate by interesting and informative volunteer guides from Bletchley Park. We braved the driving rain (typical Bank Holiday weather!) and we learned much as we walked around the beautifully kept grounds. Bletchley grew from a few hundred to over 5000 people at the end of the war, and the NAFFI there served 35,000 meals a month! It seems amazing in our age of text, emails and Facebook, that the secret work at Bletchley was never exposed - infact it remained an official secret until 1974. Also remarkable is that in the 1980's the whole site had fallen into disrepair and was going to be bulldozed to make way for a brand new housing estate! Thankfully due to tree preservation orders this was prevented and over time, and with the help of National Lottery Funding, the site has been saved for the nation and developed into a truly wonderful and educational visitor experience. We finished off the day with a visit to the National Museum of Computing which is also on the site, where a Colusus computer has been rebuilt. We were told how the Bletchley staff succeeded to decipher the even harder to break codes from the Lorenz machine. It strikes me that the staff at Bletchley in some ways were far removed from the privations and hardships of the war (Bletchley was not discovered by the Germans and so was never bombed apart from one random, stray attack by a bomber that could not find its intended target), and in other ways were right on the front line of the battle saving countless lives and months, probably years of warfare. The war was probably shortened by two years because of the work done here.